If you’ve been reading Hourglassy for a while, you may have noticed one topic that I barely cover: weight loss. I have two reasons for ignoring it.
First, Hourglassy is meant to affirm our bodies as they are. I may whine about the challenge of dressing H cups, but I don’t plan to lose them any time soon. Instead, I like to focus on how to work with what I have.
Second, I don’t want to perpetuate the myth that “curvy” is a euphemism for “I need to go on a diet”. I find this myth so pervasive that I try to avoid the word “curvy” altogether.
However, avoiding the subject of weight hasn’t been easy, especially when I really do need to go on a diet. Since starting this blog, my photos have quietly documented my transition from a US size 10 in 2008 to a size 14* beginning sometime in 2010. Yet I’ve resisted the temptation to add disclaimers such as, “This would look better if I were a few pounds lighter.” I’ve been reciting phrases like that since I was a freshman in high school, and I don’t want to go there anymore. Instead, I choose to show what a 5’3″, full-busted, size 14 woman in her forties looks like. My only regret is that I can’t use my own body to demonstrate what every full-busted woman can wear. Instead, I provide you with guest posts and Off the Rack and links to other amazing full-busted bloggers of different heights and sizes.
Perhaps my discipline of self-censorship on this blog is finally paying off in the way I view my and other women’s bodies. During yoga class on Monday, I observed not only my body in the mirror in front of me, but those of the women behind me. None of us had the idealized figures found in the media, yet there was not a single piece of shapewear in the room. We were each completely ourselves in clothing that clung to our natural contours. No one hid. Each woman simply focused her attention on accomplishing the assigned pose.
Well, almost each woman–because my attention was focused on the beauty of the teardrop-shaped woman behind me. Her hips and thighs were enormous. Passing her on the street, I would have critiqued her shape in a split second, but in that moment, I realized she was perfect. So was her thick-waisted friend next to her. Somehow every woman in the room was exactly as she was meant to be, and I was overcome with the realization. I wanted to see every woman that way everywhere all the time: calm and focused, with a confident vulnerability that comes from being seen as one is without apology.
I wish we could all wear clothing that celebrates the amazingness of who we are without hiding. I wish that we could always focus on what really matters instead of being distracted by insecurities and internalized pressures to conform, especially as we prepare to be inundated with articles about weight loss resolutions in the new year.
Personally, the subject of weight is far too loaded an issue for me to write about in depth on Hourglassy without it distracting from the goals of this blog. I want this blog to be like the mirror at the front of my yoga studio, helping you to see the beauty of who you are.
But our weight is so much a part of us that this blog would be incomplete without some treatment of the subject. That’s why I’m so delighted to have discovered a full-busted blogger who addresses it head on and has agreed to write a series of guest posts about it for Hourglassy readers. Next up: June’s piece about the challenge of finding clothing on a body made curvier by weight loss.
*If size 14 represented a healthy weight for me, I promise that I would not write that I need go on a diet.
